'He Looked At Me In The Situation Room A Few Days Ago...': JD Vance Describes Trump During Iran Strike

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During his speech to the Ohio Republican Party Dinner in Lima, Ohio, Vice President JD Vance described being with President Trump in the Situation Room for the U.S. strikes on Iran.

Transcript

00:00Let me run just a few through a few of the ways in which the Trump administration has been wildly successful.

00:10Let me start with the thing that is, of course, in the news.

00:14And what the president said going back 10 years, if you look at the campaign in 2015 and 2016,

00:20and he said it consistently through his second term, is that he does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

00:27It's very simple. It destabilizes the entire region.

00:31It gives this terrible regime leverage over the United States of America.

00:35As the president often jokes with me, everybody in Iran calls the Iranian leader the supreme leader.

00:41That's a pretty amazing title if you think about it.

00:44But he looked at me in the situation room a few days ago and he said,

00:48Mr. Vice President, you don't have to call him the supreme leader, but you would if the guy had a nuclear weapon.

00:53Because the leverage that nuclear weapons give you to destabilize the world, to destroy our economic interests,

01:01to destroy our national security interests, you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon.

01:07So what did the president do?

01:08For 60 days, he negotiated aggressively to encourage that Iranian regime to give up those weapons peacefully.

01:15And by the way, he was more than willing to accept a peaceful settlement to that problem.

01:20But again, this comes back to instincts.

01:21When the president realized that there was not going to be a peaceful settlement to that problem,

01:26he sent B-2 bombers and dropped 12, 30,000-pound bombs on the worst facility and destroyed that program.

01:40And I think there are a lot of Republicans, by the way, I count myself among them,

01:44who after the past 25 years, they don't want to get involved in another long-term, protracted Middle Eastern conflict.

01:51We all saw what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:53And so what I call the Trump doctrine is quite simple.

01:57Number one, you articulate a clear American interest, and that's, in this case, that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.

02:04Number two, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem.

02:08And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it,

02:14and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.

02:18That is the Trump doctrine.

02:19And to the Americans who are worried about this becoming a protracted conflict,

02:29I think the president solved that very quickly.

02:31Not only did we destroy the Iranian nuclear program, we did it with zero American casualties,

02:37and that's what happens when you've got strong American leadership.

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